Three former executives of accounting giant KPMG and a lawyer used lies and deception to cheat the federal government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes owed by some of the nation's richest people, a prosecutor said Wednesday. ...

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Hillebrecht ... said the case was about lies, not tax law arcana. The defendants built an elaborate, fraudulent paper trail on behalf of hundreds of individuals looking for ways to hide at least $20 million in profits each, Hillebrecht said. ...

He said jurors would not need to understand tax codes or the details of accounting tricks to know that the defendants purposely set out to lie about taxes to help rich people avoid paying them.